From: Alder Green <alder.green@...>
Date: 2006-06-06T16:08:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Bzipping a file from ruby

On 6/6/06, Aredridel <aredridel@nbtsc.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-06-06 at 11:33 +0900, Edgardo Hames wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Is there a way to bzip2 a file from Ruby without invoking the unix
> > app? I want to create a bzipped tarball without using any external
> > programs so my app can run using anything but plain ol' Ruby. I'm
> > already using archive-tar-minitar to create the tarball but now I need
> > a way to compress it.
>
> I don't know of any pure ruby implementations of the bzip2 algorithm. I
> suspect that if there's any libraries out there, they'd bind libbz2...
> at which point it's also not pure ruby.
>
> Aria
>
>
>

Yup. I was looking for such a thing myself, and only found bz2[1]. In
fact, that library seems to be the only way of utilizing BZip2 from
Ruby currently; at least there are no other listed in the
Library/Compression category of RAA [2].

Right now, I'm using the gzip algorithm instead, which you don't even
need a gem for (part of core). It would be nice to see pure-ruby
implementations of the more advanced algorithms out there (bzip2,
7-zip).

-- 
-Alder

[1] http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/bz2/
[2] http://raa.ruby-lang.org/cat.rhtml?category_major=Library;category_minor=Compression